To add to what Graham said, if you perhaps opened the essays directly from
an email attachment, edited, and saved, you were saving them in a temp
folder, from which they would be deleted when you quit Word.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"chokletghost" wrote in message
oups.com...
I've lost saved work! I was working on an important set of essays
last night, saving repeated times, and went to bed without closing the
Word program. The power went out, and in the morning I had to turn my
computer on again because it was turned off. I've opened up the
document again, only to find the original version of the document I
started from, alongside multiple transparent files with names like
~WRL2479.tmp and I am unable to put the two together. I know Microsoft
Word creates a "ghost-like" temporary file each time an open document
is saved, but I don't know how to manually make use of it. Is there a
way to open up the AutoRecover sidebar to decode these temporary files?
I've succeeded in opening them up in Notepad, but all there is is a
bunch of symbols and the original writing. I need to resurrect the
changes!